You can imagine that that’s not a trivial task. We
had to embark on a pretty major development effort to reskin all of the SDKs to make a common notion of identity, and then make sure that all of the products had a common SDK look and feel. Then we did a bunch of data integration work between all the products and added a bunch of new capabilities, like our relay in the lobby. We brought in a product called CCD [Cloud Content Delivery], our remote config product. All of them had to be integrated in such a way that it
is possible for someone to use multiple UGS products together in an integrated fashion. That was a long build. It’s taken a couple of years. The journey started in 2019, so it’s been about three years. We’re actually very proud of the point we’ve reached now, which is a comprehensive set of services. They’re modular, but they are integrated. That was the achievement we had hoped for.
Were there any particular obstacles that came to mind, in regards to integrating them? So the biggest single obstacle, as with similar products or projects like this, is that you have a number of offerings that were never intended to be integrated in any way. You have to do the engineering to make sure that they’re all working together and install a data pipeline underneath all of them. So the obstacles are generally going to be that you’re having to adapt services to each other and build integrations, which takes a large amount of effort. It’s worth it, though, because the value that we bring with UGS today is great for the user.
How big is the team working on UGS? It’s in the hundreds. I mean, we have decided as a company that this type of offering is going to be strategic for Unity’s future. So we’re very serious about this investment. We also have a number of new offerings that we haven’t even announced yet, that are being worked on right now..
So how have you and the team worked with developers to make UGS even better since launch? How do you organise and respond to feedback? We have, internally, an early release programme. What we will do is allow customers to come in to try out parts of UGS that are new, before they’re launched publicly. We’ve done that for every single part of UGS that wasn’t itself originally a product we acquired. We’ve had a lot of feedback on some of the things that you see out there today, like our cloud code module within UGS with the idea of serverless compute. Through feedback, we found that while we support the ability to write JavaScript in the cloud, our developers
on the Unity side, those who use the Unity Engine, were saying, “Hey, look, you’re gonna have to add more language types.” So we’ve heard that feedback loud and clear. On our roadmap is C# support, because our Unity developers demand that. So that’s a great example of customer feedback and forming what our future direction is. Another one is that
people are asking for new capabilities around cloud saves, and the ability to store persistent data. What I’m really happy about, is that we put UGS out there with a position. A point of view. Then we built it in a way that we knew worked really well. We’ve seen a lot of success. But what I love is being able to actually have it out there and get customer feedback that teaches us the actual new direction and new capabilities we should add. We’ve been able to do that really effectively. So over time, we’ll continue to do early releases of new features within UGS, and solicit customer input all along the way. That’s what’s forming our picture of how we’re going to take it forward.
Have you ever thought about developing a game in-house with UGS, like how Epic Games develop things with Unreal to test features? The position here is that Unity doesn’t compete with its customers. We are generally going to focus on enabling technology. There are in our sports and live entertainment and consumer divisions, tools and technologies that we think are really fun for consumers, but it’s generally going to be B2B. When we’re talking about building games, we’re just really, really excited about our customers doing an amazing job.
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